“Have You Ever Had Thoughts of Suicide?”

Haven’t we all?

Photo by on

Yesterday morning dawned an unusually hopeful day for me. There are a couple of medications I’m hoping to get prescriptions for that could give me back a semblance of my life — the one I had before 2021.

2021, the year my long-beleaguered connective tissues lost the battle keeping my spine in its proper position. My lumbar vertebrae were the first to exceed their natural boundaries, pushing into muscle and nerve. The pain was incredible.

I had maybe 2–4 hours in a day where I could be upright — walking, talking, interacting with the world — before the pain would overtake me so completely I couldn’t even read. I tried every way imaginable: standing, sitting (which I was rapidly learning was a thing of the past for me), lying down, partially reclined, listening to an audiobook. It didn’t matter; my mind couldn’t focus on anything but the sheer magnitude of my physical agony.

The first time I saw Dr. Siddiqui was in March of 2022; he’s a pain management specialist. The last doctor I saw for this condition tried to put me on is a forever-medicine. You know, the kind that takes a while to become fully effective and is hard and/or impossible to stop taking once you’ve begun. This particular drug enhances the effects of opioids and has contributed to overdose deaths.